Paris is building three new bridges over the Seine

The project is part of a larger plan to fight climate change

The Paris we know and love will soon go through a bout of changes, but luckily, they’ll be for the better. This week, Paris City Hall proposed building three garden bridges over the Seine to transform the river bank into a futuristic-meets-historical destination.

According to the The Times, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to build three new pedestrian bridges over the Seine in a move to revive the city’s 18th-century tradition of having merchants set up stalls on bridges. It’s hard to imagine exactly what the final project will look like, because as one city official claimed, there’s “nothing like it anywhere in the world as far as we know.” It could be similar to Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, which is filled mostly with jewellery shops and art stores, but it’ll be more of a city plaza.

Hidalgo wants private developers to fund the bridges, all of which would be closed-off to cars and accessible only by pedestrians and cyclists. Similar to city plazas, they’ll include gardens, cafes, shops, and other small businesses. Aside from repurposing overlooked urban areas, the project is part of City Hall’s plan to modernize Paris and make it less of a tourist-driven museum city. In a similar vein, Hidalgo cancelled the city’s annual Christmas Market on the Champs-Élysées. Earlier this month, City Hall also announced it wanted to install sparkling water fountains throughout the city to help Parisians stay hydrated.

The proposal is part of a larger initiative with C40, a network of 90 cities around the world aimed at fighting climate change (C40 is chaired by Hidalgo). The group announced a global competition this week for cities to revitalize underused urban spaces, and Paris’s three-bridge plan is one such entry. The bridges will be erected in different parts of the city, none of which are typical tourist areas: near André Citroën park on the western edge of the 15th arrondissement, between Pont de Sully and Pont d’Austerlitz close to the centre of the city, and on the eastern border of the 13th arrondissement near the Bercy-Charenton district.